A lot of people have written about Shuji Nakamura, an engineer at Nichia Corporation, who perfected the blue LED (light-emitting diode.) The blue LED was critical to the development of many products we use today, including DVD players and LCD flat panel monitors (among other popular consumer electronics.)
The tragedy surrounding Nakamura was that he was only given $189 by his company for this world-changing invention. After realizing that his company did not have his best interests at heart, he left to go teach at UC Santa Barbara.
The most recent news is that Nakamura has won a legal battle in court in Japan to have Nichia pay him for his work, the patents, royalties, and his legal fees. In fact the Tokyo courts have given him $20B yen, or over $1M for every dollar that Nichia Corp. gave him ($189) at the time of his groundbreaking work. This is great news for Nakamura, for inventors in Japan, and a strong message to companies to not exploit their most valuable resources. If Nichia had promoted Nakamura, and given him a portion of the sales of his product, one might imagine Nakamura to be a happy executive at Nichia today. Instead, he is a professor living in Santa Barbara, having won one of the largest settlements surrounding intellectual property in Japan. Sure, Japanese companies will now go farther with their employment contracts in order secure control of employee IP, so it means that employees must be more aware of their contracts and of their work.
Nakamura’s legal fight is not over by any means, but in the court of public opinion, he has already won.
Inventor Wins a Round in Tokyo Court [nytimes.com]
Blue LED inventor awarded 20 billion yen [asahi.com]
Industry shaken by patent decision [yomiuri.co.jp]
Japanese Court Awards Ex-Worker Millions [guardian.co.uk]
My previous posts on Nakamura are from Sept 2002 and July 2001.
correction: DVDs use red lasers. only now they’re moving in with blue lasers… hence: Blu-Ray.
note, nakamura did win a nobel prize. could THAT have anything to do with him being awarded all that money? MAYBE… of course, it sets a “precedent” for all future IP issues… “you have to win a noble prize to even get your own IP back…” hmm… talk about climbing only the 2nd highest mountain instead of just the highest…
but the BIGGEST issue was not money… it is the fact that nakamura could not continue his own research at UCSB without licensing his own IP from nichida…
now THAT is kicking dirt in your face.
correction: DVDs use red lasers. only now they’re moving in with blue lasers… hence: Blu-Ray.
note, nakamura did win a nobel prize. could THAT have anything to do with him being awarded all that money? MAYBE… of course, it sets a “precedent” for all future IP issues… “you have to win a noble prize to even get your own IP back…” hmm… talk about climbing only the 2nd highest mountain instead of just the highest…
but the BIGGEST issue was not money… it is the fact that nakamura could not continue his own research at UCSB without licensing his own IP from nichida…
now THAT is kicking dirt in your face.
Andrew, Prof. Nakamura hasn’t been awarded a Nobel prize yet. You’re maybe confusing him for Koichi Tanaka, recipient of the 2002 chemistry Nobel prize.
At any rate, the blue diode would rank, IMHO, as an “invention benefiting mankind [..] within the fields of physics [..] or chemistry” as specified by Alfred Nobel in his will establishing the Nobel foundation and the prize.
Think about all the energy that is going to be saved at a household, and at a country, and at a global level if all those energy-inefficient electric bulbs were replaced by the white LED lights made possible by the blue LED ! We’d then be talking *major* reductions ( ~10% ? ) in environment-impacting power plant greenhouse gas emissions, and lessened need for e.g. messy nuclear power plants.
Once the blue LED patent jealously held by Nichia expires — around 2010, — expect a flourishing of creative, and cost-effective LED-based lighting fixtures…
As for Nakamura’s LED-related IP, even though the Japanese courts found that they belonged to his erstwhile employer, patent law specifies that anybody is free to build and study patented inventions for research purposes.
There are thus no restrictions placed on Prof. Nakamura to continue working on these devices, but he’d presumably have to establish e.g. cross-licensing agreements with Nichia if he founds a new company commercializing any blue LED-related inventions he might make while at UCSB.
One more thing. The latest lower court decision — which Nichia are appealing, of course — found that Prof. Nakamura was entitled to 60 billion yens as his share of Nichia’s profit.
Nakamura had only claimed 20Bn, but chances are, as the restive Nichia are appealing, that he’d see no reason to be kind to them and file an amended claim for the whole 60Bn — about US$ 570 million — which the court found Nichia owed him.
As Nakamura now lives in California, that state and the US federal government might yet get a huge windwall — totalling about US$ 150 million — in income taxes from him. The California State University system might have made a very shrewd investment, luring him away by promising him a fat salary at UCSB
WHOOOPS! my bad. totally got those 2 confused. thanks for the correction.
damn, that is smart of USCB… damn.
Japan Patents Court
Some good, progressive news for Japan in a while – Japan’s first intellectual property disputes court. The Government also planned to send lawyers and judges to Britain, Brussels and the US to study recent cases, and invite overseas legal experts…
Hi:
I wrote a book with Shuji Nakamura, you can find the details and a slide presentation here:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/bluelaser/
Gerhard
Hi:
I wrote a book with Shuji Nakamura, you can find the details and a slide presentation here:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/bluelaser/
Gerhard